Dangerous Laughter (7 page)

I now began to visit Wolf’s house after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I was free of the library, and on weekend afternoons. I would climb the stairs to Wolf’s room, where we talked for a while, and then he would rise from the chair or bed very slowly, as if he were being tugged back by a tremendous force, and lead me up to the attic. At the door of Isabel’s room he knocked with one knuckle, lightly, twice. Without waiting for a reply, he held open the door and closed it quickly behind me before returning to his room. If he cared that I was spending less time with him than with his sister, he never showed it. If anything, he seemed eager for me to visit her—it was as if he thought I might cure her in some way. Exactly what it all meant I didn’t know, couldn’t care. I knew only that I needed to visit Isabel, to be with her in that room. The darkness excited me—I could feel it seize me and draw me in. Everything in me seemed to quicken there.

The darkness, the hidden face, the secret room, the unseeing of Isabel—it all soon came to feel as much a part of her as her voice. If I tried to picture her, I saw a wavering shadowy image that hardened gradually into a tall girl in Bermuda shorts, holding a trowel. Sometimes, before she faded away, I saw gray, amused eyes—Wolf’s eyes. She loved games, all sorts of games, and it occurred to me that one thing we were doing in that room was playing the game of darkness. She was like a child who closes her eyes, stretches out her arms, and pretends to be blind. For all I knew, she might really be blind—she might really be anything. Whatever she was, I had to go there, to the dark at the top of the house.

In one of our kitchen drawers, the one to the right of the silverware drawer, there were two flashlights, a regular one and a very small one, the size of a fountain pen. One day not long after my first visit, I slipped the small flashlight into my pocket and carried it with me into the darkness of Isabel’s room. My plan was to take it out during one of our games, fiddle with it, and shine it suddenly and briefly, as if by accident, at Isabel. She would spring into existence—at last!—if only for a second, before vanishing into the hidden world. I would apologize and we would continue as before.

As I sat in the stiff chair, holding the little flashlight and listening to Isabel tell me about a new word game she’d invented, I kept waiting for the right moment. I could hear her shifting in the bed—I imagined her moving her arms about as she talked. Then I imagined her sleeves, perhaps pajama sleeves, slipping back along her gesturing forearms. At that instant my desire to see her, to strip her of darkness, became so ferocious that I raised my fingertips to my throat and felt the thudding of my blood. I imagined her startled eyes, brilliant with fear. It seemed to me that to shine the light at Isabel, to expose her to my greedy gaze, would be like tearing off her clothes. With a feeling of shame, of sorrow, and of something that felt like gratitude, I returned the light to my pocket.

And settling into the chair, as the afternoon’s deep night flowed into me, I wondered at my ignorance; for I saw that what held me there was the darkness, the lure of an unseen, mysterious world.

Meanwhile, in the unmysterious world outside Wolfland, I burst out laughing in the cafeteria, raised my hand in American History, banged my locker shut. I shelved books in the library, drank cherry Cokes at Lucy’s Luncheonette, and went miniature golfing on Friday nights with Ray and Dennis, while cars rolled by on the Post Road with their windows open and tough-looking boys with slicked-back hair slapped their hands on car tops to blasts of rock ’n’ roll. At every moment I felt invaded by Isabel, but at the same time I had trouble remembering her exactly, in the world beyond her room. The sunlit realm kept threatening to make a ghost of her, or to erase her entirely, and I began to look forward to the coming of night, when she grew more vivid in my mind.

One Saturday morning as I was walking in town, on my way to buy a birthday card for a girl in my French class, I was shocked to see Isabel strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore. Her dark hair, cut short, was held back by a glossy barrette, and her short-sleeved white blouse was tucked into her jeans, which were rolled up to midcalf. A navy-blue pocketbook, slung over her left shoulder, kept bumping against her right hip. Although I knew that Isabel never left her house, that I had allowed a scattering of details, which must have been collecting in my mind, to attach themselves to this stranger strolling out of Mancini’s drugstore, still my heart beat hard, my breath came quick, and not until later that afternoon, when I climbed the wooden stairs, did I grow calm in the rich blackness of Isabel’s chamber.

Sometimes when I sat with her in the dark I wondered whether she was deformed in some way. I imagined a twisted mouth, a smashed nose, a mulberry birthmark spreading like a stain across her face. As a ghost-swarm of ugly Isabels rose in my mind, I felt repelled not so much by the images as by something in myself that was creating them, and as if in protest another kind of Isabel began to appear, blue-eyed Isabels and smiling Isabels, Isabels in red shorts, Isabels in faded jeans with a dark blue patch in back where a pocket had torn off, Isabels in white bathing suits wiping their glistening arms with beach towels, until my brain was so filled with false Isabels that I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, as if to crush them to death.

One night I thought: The blackness is a poison that soaks into my skin and makes me insane. During these seizures I have delusions that I call Isabel. The thought interested me, excited me, as if I had found the solution to a difficult problem in trigonometry, but as the night wore on, the idea grew less and less interesting until it left me feeling bored and indifferent.

One afternoon as we were playing the game of objects, Isabel said, “Now hold out your hand palm up, this is a tricky one.” I was instantly alert; something in her voice betrayed a secret excitement. Holding out my hand as she had instructed, I heard some movement on the bed. A moment later I felt a softly hard, heavyish object lowered slowly onto my palm. A confusion came over me, I began to close my fingers over it, suddenly there was a wild laugh near my ear and she snatched the strange object away, crying, “Couldn’t you guess? Couldn’t you guess?” but I had already recognized, lying for a moment in the palm of my hand, Isabel’s warm forearm.

As the evenings became hotter, I found it difficult to sit at my desk doing homework in the light of my twin-bulb fluorescent lamp. I had always found it pleasing and even soothing to complete homework assignments: the carefully numbered answers, the crisp sound of turned pages, the red and yellow and green index tabs, the clean white notebook paper with its orderly rows of blue lines and the pale red line running down the side. Now it all irritated me, as if I were being distracted from the real business of life. Through the screens of my partly open windows I could hear the sounds of my neighborhood at dusk: low voices in a nearby yard, the rising and falling hum of a distant lawnmower, dishes clinking from an open window, the slam of a car door, a girl’s high laughter. I began memorizing the sounds and collecting new ones, so that I could report them to Isabel: footsteps in another room, which might be my father going into the kitchen for a box of crackers or my mother coming in from the back porch; the sound of a garage door being lowered; the wheels of a passing bicycle rustling in the sand at the side of the street. The sounds pleased me, because I could bring them to Isabel, but at the same time they disturbed me, for it was as if the world that separated me from Isabel were growing thicker and more impenetrable as I listened.

At night I kept waking up and falling asleep, as Isabels tumbled through my mind. In the mornings I felt sluggish and heavy-headed, and sometimes during the day I would catch my mother looking at me in the way she did when I was coming down with something.

One afternoon toward the middle of June, Isabel seemed a little distracted. It was hot in the attic room and the darkness seemed thick and soft, like wool. I could hear her shifting about on the bed, and then I heard another sound, as of fingers stroking cloth, but silkier. “What are you doing, Isabel?” “Oh, brushing my hair.” I imagined the brush I’d half glimpsed on the bureau as it pulled its way through stretched-out hair that kept changing from dark to blond to reddish brown. I heard the clunk of what I thought must be a brush on a table and suddenly she said, “Would you like to see my room?” My hands clutched the arms of the chair—I imagined a burst of light, like a blow to my forehead. Isabel laughed; her laughter sounded cruel; I knew nothing about this girl in the dark, who was suddenly going to reveal herself to me in some violent way; I could feel an Isabel rising in my mind, but her head was the head of some girl in my English class, which faded away and was replaced by another head; something touched my arm. “Get up,” her voice said, very close to me.

Holding my wrist in her hand, she led me through the dark and placed my hand on cool wood surfaces, roundish knobs, soft protuberances, velvety edges. Images of drawers and padded seats and velvet jewel boxes floated in my mind. After a while I felt against my palm the familiar back of my upholstered chair with its row of metal buttons. “Is the tour over, Isabel?” “One more item of interest.” She took a step and, still holding my wrist, placed my hand on a rumpled softness that felt like a sheet. “Tour over,” she said, and released my wrist. I heard a creak, a rustling, silence.

“So how do you like my room?” she asked, in a voice that came from the other end of the bed.

“It’s very—it’s very—,” I said, searching for the exact word.

“You probably ought to lie down, you know. If you’re tired.”

I climbed tensely onto the bed, pressing my knees into the mattress, and began crawling across it toward her voice. “Nnnn!” I said, snatching my hand away as something moved out of reach. The bed seemed long, longer than the entire room, though I was moving so slowly that I was almost motionless. “Are you there?” I said to the dark. Isabel said nothing. I patted about: a pillow, another pillow, a sheet, a turned-back spread. “Where are you?” I asked the dark. “Here,” she whispered, so close that I could feel her breath against my ear. I reached out and felt empty air. “I can’t see you, Isabel.” Deep in the room I heard a burst of laughter. “Can you fly, Isabel? Is that your secret?” I listened to the room. “Are you anywhere?” Still kneeling on the bed, but raising my upper body, like a rearing horse, I swept out both hands, my fingertips fluttering about, stroking the dark. From the pillow and sheets came a fresh, slightly soapy scent. I lay down on my stomach, pressing my cheek into a pillow and inhaling the scent of Isabel. In the darkness I closed my eyes. Somewhere I heard a sound, as of a foot knocking against a piece of furniture. Then I felt a pushing-down in the mattress. Something hard pressed against the side of my arm. I felt the hardness with my fingertips and suddenly understood that I was touching a face. It pulled away. “Isabel,” I said. “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.” Nothing was there. In the thick darkness I felt myself dissolving, turning into black mist, spreading into the farthest reaches of the room.

III

REVELATION

On a brilliant afternoon in July, under a sky so blue that it seemed to have weight, the beach towels on the sand reminded me of the rectangles of color in a child’s paint box. Here and there a slanted beach umbrella partly shaded a blanket. Under the wide umbrellas, thermos jugs and cooler chests and half-open picnic baskets stood among yellow water wings and green sea monsters. On my striped towel, in the fierce sun, I leaned back on both elbows and stared off past my ankle bones at the place where the rippling dry sand changed to flat and wet. Low waves broke slowly in uneven lines. The water moved partway up the beach and slid back, leaving a dark shine that quickly vanished.

People were walking about, sitting up on blankets, running in and out of the water. A tall girl with a blond ponytail and coppery glistening legs came walking along the wet sand. Her bathing suit was so white that it looked freshly painted. Her sticking-out breasts looked hard and sharp, like funnels. A small rubber football flew spinning through the bright blue air. In the sand a gull walked stiffly and half lifted its wings. Down in the shallow water a thick-chested senior in a tight bathing suit crouched on his hands and knees, so that I could see the blond hairs glowing on his lower spine—suddenly a lanky junior with hard-muscled legs came running down the beach into the water, flung his hands onto the back of his kneeling friend, and flipped gracefully into the air, landing in the water with a splash. Tilted bottles of soda gleamed here and there in the sand beside beach towels, a girl in a turquoise two-piece stood by the foot of the lifeguard stand, looking up and shading her eyes, and high in the sky a yellow helicopter seemed stuck in the thick blue heavy summer air.

Laughing, whooping, running their hands through their wet hair, Ray and Dennis came striding toward me, kicking up bursts of sand. They picked up their towels and stood rubbing their chests and arms. Water streamed from their bathing suits.

“So guess who I ran into down by the jetty,” Ray said, laying out his towel carefully in the sand. “Joyce. She said Vicky thinks you’re mad at her.” He threw himself facedown on the towel.

“I’m not mad at her. I just want—I just need—”

“Ah just
want,
” Dennis said, holding up his hands as if they were poised over a guitar. “Ah just
need.
” He strummed the guitar.

Summer had come, season of sweet loafing. I spent long hours lying on the beach, playing ping-pong in my shady garage, and reading on the screened back porch, where thin stripes of sun and shade fell across my book from the bamboo blinds. Even my job at the library seemed a lazy sort of half-dreaming, as I wheeled my cart slowly between high dim shelves pierced by spears of sun. But as I lay on the beach running my fingers through the warm sand, as I bent over to retrieve a ping-pong ball from a cluster of broken-toothed rakes and shiny red badminton poles rusting at the bottom, all the time I was waiting for Isabel. She slept until one or two in the afternoon. No one was allowed to visit her till the middle of the day. Wolf himself never rose before noon and seemed amused at what he called my peculiar habits. “The early bird catches the worm,” he said, “but who wants the worm?” I found myself rising later and later in the morning, but there were always hours of sunshine to get through before I arrived in the dark.